A Short History of The Airport

It’s where our ancient instincts to travel, to trade, to reunite with family and explore meet modern technology and innovation. From muddy airfields to gleaming cathedrals of designer shopping, fancy restaurants and even botanical gardens- the airport has become this weird and wonderful place that tells the story of the modern world. For the 80th birthday of Heathrow - one of the world’s pioneering and most connected airports - Dan explores the curious history of the airport from the earliest versions back in the 1920s, through the luxurious golden age of travel to the revolution of the jet age and beyond. To find out more, head to Heathrow.com/80 Thanks to Alastair Gordon, author of ‘Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure’, as well as Alan Smilie, Ady Dolan, Zulfikar and Joseph Gregory at Heathrow. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:36Speaker 00

  At the time, it wasn't even Heathrow. It was London Airport. And back then, it was just a collection of army tents, prefab huts in a field. It was often so muddy, they had to walk on wooden duck boards laid across the ground. But even still, it felt different to the airfields that so many had experienced during the war. It was a new airport. It had floral, patterned armchairs for a start, and sofas for travellers to rest on. There were tables with fresh flowers to create a pleasant ambiance while they waited to board. It was rudimentary, yes, but those very first passengers must have felt like they were on the cusp of the future.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  These new-fangled flying machines, once the reserve of aristocrats and military men, were now being made accessible for regular people. And by doing so, they would change everything.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  The world must still have felt so big, so exotic, and yet now it felt reachable like never before. The very first flight out of London Airport was in a converted Lancaster bomber, Starlight they called it, flying to Buenos Aires. The journey would take over 35 hours, stopping several times to refuel. And today, in just 80 years of staggering momentum, that airport now operates around 1,400 flights every day, with a plane taking off or landing every 45 seconds.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  We're so used to rushing through the airport, trying to make the flight, looking for the gates, doing a bit of last-minute shopping, that I don't think we really stop and think about just how central these places are in the modern story of us, of humanity. And it's also a place where our greatest technological achievements can meet and facilitate our oldest human instincts: to explore, to trade, to consume, to migrate, to reunite with loved ones, and to get to that bigger world beyond our horizons.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  I'm just walking now into the giant terminal at Heathrow Airport, which celebrates its 80th birthday this year.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  I'm going to trace the story of this place, from its beginnings as a prefab in a farmer's field, to this giant cathedral I'm standing in now, this place of commerce and glass and steel. This entry and exit point, Heathrow's one of the great pioneers in the story of air travel. It's here that we can explore how we got to where we are today, where controllers in towering glass buildings figure out how to orchestrate thousands of enormous aircraft landing and taking off every day with astonishing precision and in safety. That we can think about how air travel revolutionised global trade. And also here, I want to explore this key question of who on earth buys luggage after they've passed through security?

• 4:06Speaker 00

  What's that about? So folks, close those overheads, check out where the emergency exits are, and do it your seatbelts. Sit back and relax. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, and this is a short history of the airport.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  They call it Heathrow locally. A few years back, it was seven square miles of quiet, middlesex countryside. It was in April 1944 that history came to these country fields. Thus, in under two years, British engineers had built and were operating one of the largest civil aerodromes in the world.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  I'm walking through the departures lounge now, surrounded on all sides by shops, flashing lights. It's an enticing space, and I cannot tell you the amount of times I have run through this place at top speed because I'm about to miss a flight. I've been here either dragging my kids, or trying to catch up with my long-suffering producer, Marion Defarge, of this podcast, who is on time and presents herself at the gate with passport, boarding pass, and two-liter bottle of water. I am a sweating, heavily breathing mess as I get to the gates, because I get distracted in this vast emporium through which I'm now walking.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  There's my favourite sushi place, I Drag the Team, when we've been on the way to Peru or China. And this is the bit where you've done the admin, you've checked in your bags, you've got that all-important boarding pass in your pocket or on your phone, and you can just kick back and relax, wait for that flight to take off. This is where the anticipation builds for the work trip, for the holiday, the vacation. This is where it all happens. There's a sense of magic here on this concourse. All the excitement that our forebears would have felt, standing on the wharves as the tall ships cast off their ropes and they sailed off to a place over the horizon, all that excitement is what we feel right here. This is our portal to the rest of the world.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  And we've been imagining and designing these spaces ever since air travel was pioneered, when that great, seemingly unsolvable challenge of heavier-than-air-powered flight was suddenly solved.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  It was 1903 when two bicycle mechanics from Ohio managed to coax a fragile machine of wood and muslin into the air for around 12 seconds at Kitty Hawk. Their names were Orville and Wilbur Wright.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  This prototype aircraft barely travelled 120 feet. It actually crashed later that day when a gust of wind picked it up and rolled it over onto the ground. It was so damaged it never flew again. But that first flight did prove something revolutionary: that a powered aircraft could take off, it could be controlled in flight and land safely.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  The age of heavier-than-air aviation had begun. Progress was astonishingly fast. Inventors and engineers across Europe and America raced to build bigger and faster and more reliable aircraft. And what began as experimental flying machines quickly became practical tools. Aircraft evolved from curious novelties at public demonstrations into something with military potential. It wasn't long before humans did what they so often do with new technology and adapt it for warfare. Soon, those planes were carrying bombs, and they were taking aerial photographs of each other's movements, and there was even dueling, fighting going on in the skies.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  And terrible as that bloody conflict was, it did accelerate the development of aviation faster than would have been the case in peacetime. By 1918, planes could fly higher, faster, further, more reliably than anyone had imagined a decade earlier. And when peace did return, governments and entrepreneurs began to wonder: if aircraft could carry bombs and people across vast spaces, well, why not passengers, post, and cargo?

• 8:35Speaker 00

  As the 1920s arrived, so too did the age of commercial air travel. This is Alastair Gordon. He's a cultural historian. He's author of Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. And he's talking to me about the earliest iterations of the airport.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  In terms of, you know, a modern airport, I think that moment when Charles Lindbergh, May of 1927, you know, made it across the Atlantic, landed in the middle of the night at Bourget in Paris. And it seemed that moment of this heroic challenge that Lindbergh, you know, managed to succeed at. And then coming into Paris, and he couldn't believe how big the airport was at Bourget. You know, he thought it was a huge factory because there was nothing like it in the US. When he took off from Long Island, you know, it was just a field, you know, with a hangar at one end. And then he came back and basically preached this doctrine of without airports, European countries have these nationally financed, you know, incredible railroad type station

• 9:35Speaker 02

  airports that we're so far behind. So he literally flew around the country from town to town, preaching this new gospel of how aviation was going to create a new economy in the United States. And that's really a fascinating moment to me.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  I didn't realise, so airports were designed to actually give a sense of security and officialdom to passengers. I just assumed they sprang up because that's the nature of entrepreneur. But you think actually the majesty of the surroundings is meant to make people calm down and be a little less nervous about their flight?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Well, certainly with Henry Ford, I mean, that's the way he thought. Most people who flew either had to fly because they were like businessmen on deadlines when they had to beat out the other guy, you know, by like a day who was taking the train, something like that. But often you'd sit on a pile of mailbags in the back of the plane.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  And in those early airports that you studied, do you start to see the patterns, the bone structure of the modern airport that we still recognise today? Are there check-in desks and waiting areas and stores?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  It's so tied in with the war, the two major world wars right of the 20th century. Because after World War One, you had these first bombers that could be converted into passenger use. And then they realised, especially in Europe, they realised that there was this lucrative potential in all that. Both in Europe and America, there was a tendency to use the conventional railroad station as a model. That kind of made sense, although airplanes don't run on tracks. But a lot of the early utopian conceptual ideas for these things were crazy, like on the rooftop of buildings. You know, the idea would be that airplanes would come right into the middle of the city and you'd just take an elevator up and get on the roof and, you know, take off. And there were a couple of major design competitions.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  One in America, sponsored by Lehigh Concrete. It was huge, 1929, and 150 or 200 architects from around the world. They looked like Spanish manor houses or, you know, Tudor cottages. It was very much eclectic neohistoric kind of styles. But there were a few that were very modern, one of them being Frank Lloyd Wright's son, Lloyd Wright, who did a series of very interesting, very forward looking, what could the airplane bring to architecture that would change it and make it ultra-modern? And I think that was a big change. So you have this new kind of architecture. Luc Robuzé was a huge proponent of air travel and he designed an airport in his city for

• 11:55Speaker 02

  3 million, I think it's 1920 or 21, where the planes would somehow fly between the glass towers and land in the middle of the city. And then there'd be a railway station underneath and highways. And he then became a good friend of Saint Exoubé, you know, the famous writer who wrote The Little Prince, but it was also a very famous French pilot. And he would fly them all over Morocco and then later in South America. And he came up with this notion of the pilot's point of view, that a modern architect had to understand that aerial perspective, you know, because the future was all about this new dimension that you saw from the air.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Alastair, tell me about the first real airport in the UK.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  The one that I know of is the most famous was Croydon, you know, outside of London. Around 1927, 1928, started to open and really be the official imperial airport for the British Empire, not just UK, but here are these huge lumbering aircraft, Imperial Airways aircraft would go off to all points of the British Empire. The architectural style was sort of this baronial, almost like an estate, you know, a country estate. But it architecturally on the interior was really interesting because it was the first that I know of to separate incoming and outgoing passengers. The baggage area, customs area, had big storage area for goods that were being shipped

• 13:18Speaker 02

  out to, you know, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, whatever, all these points, India, all around the world.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  I suppose if you're the British Empire, it's a bit embarrassing. I mean, ports have grown up reasonably organically, but it's a bit embarrassing if you're the people landing from all over the world, the heart of empire, and it's a kind of rubbish airfield. I mean, is there a sense from the beginning that these airports are going to need to be publicly funded because they're an advertisement for the country?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're certainly in the UK, absolutely. You know, that this was a reflection of the empire and the country.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  So Croydon Airport was the ancestor, the predecessor to all London's airports. It's where Imperial Airways operated out of, the forerunner of today's British Airways, if you like. It was the first official international airport. And it was there at Croydon that some of the world's first air traffic control systems were introduced and pioneered and implemented. It's where customs and immigration facilities were experimented with. But by the late 1930s, the aircraft were coming too big, too large for the runway, which was so sandwiched in by urban development, there was no room to expand. So a new site was scouted. It was to the west of London, around a hamlet called Heath Row.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  During the Second World War, the British government requisitioned the land here and were hoping to build a really vast airfield for bombers heading to the war in the Far East. Thankfully, before it could be put to use for that purpose, the war ended. Now, Britain needed a new international airport to replace Croydon, and so this area that had been scouted around Heath Row was perfect. On the 1st of January 1946, it opened as a London airport. The name Heath Row didn't actually come from the 1960s, interestingly. And the first commercial flight to Buenos Aires took place just a few months later on. From the beginning, this was really an airport facing the future. It was built for the future. Soon muddy fields gave way to paved walkways and permanent terminals as comfort and leisure became key to the whole experience.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Speaking of comfort and leisure, look what I'm just spotted down here. Hello. There's some upscale shops on either side of me. We've got Louis Vuitton, we've got Rolex, but here in the middle, very handy, feels like it's an omen, folks, is the Fortnum and Mason Bar. If you've never had a Fortnum and Mason's, folks, they're a quintessentially British brand that built its reputation on provisioning explorers, naval officers and travellers with food that could survive long journeys. During the Polonka Wars, for example, it supplied luxury food for soldiers, officials, sailors that had been posted far out across the world, across the empire, looking for that comforting taste of home. And today, people are sitting on their high stools, never really sat here and had a drink

• 16:01Speaker 00

  or eaten anything, but I must say I'm rapidly reevaluating that right now. They're uncorking bowls of wine. Hi there. Hi, how are you? Good, thank you.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  What exactly would you like?

• 16:11Speaker 00

  I would love a glass of champagne, please.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Sure, I'll get it at that fee.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  In the early days, flying was expensive and it could be quite glamorous. And passengers liked to have a meal or a cocktail before departure because flying was really supposed to resemble, supposed to compete with first-class rail or ocean travel. It was all about that elite experience. Here's Alastair again. Alastair, is there a moment when air travel goes from being functional, survival, just clinging on inside a fuselage to get to where you want to go, to being a sort of luxury experience, end to end?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yes, I think very early on, you have, one trip was sort of this very well bred, went to Yale, had all his Yale and Princeton friends invest in Pan American Airways. It was originally called PAA. And, you know, it was a crazy idea, but it was very clubbish. And he got these sort of society architects to design these very club-like terminals, both in New York, the Marine Air Base, which is now LaGuardia, and down in Miami, he built several different terminals that were designed to really attract the wealthy class. And in Miami, they were mainly to go to Cuba or the Bahamas to drink prohibition Arab booze.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  And we call it the golden age of travel, I guess, because, well, it was exclusive, it was luxury, it was expensive. So you'd be on an aircraft and there'd be celebrities and sports stars and it was a minority, it was for the ultra-rich.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  You can afford to do it, but not normal middle class. It was still pretty much too expensive.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  And crowds would gather to watch people arrive at airports. I mean, it became a place that you'd travel out to and watch people arriving, I guess, getting back, going to concerts, getting back, going to massive political summits, all that sort of thing.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Well, it's like the Beatles landing at JFK in 64 to be on the Ed Sullivan Show. You know, that's a great moment. That was totally theatre, and that goes back to almost the earliest days, especially in Europe. Germany, there was this tendency to always put a kind of sports palace kind of seating on the roof of the airports. There's a famous one in Hamburg, Fullspittel or something like that, really early, 1927. And it had a huge kind of stadium on the roof because I think it might be the first in Europe that again, separated incoming, outgoing passengers, but even more importantly, separating the gawkers, you know, the sightseers who just come to see, well, you know, they're aviation nerds who just want to see the airplanes, they're coming to see the airplanes.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  But as you said, you know, a lot of people just want to come to see the celebrities or the famous pilots, whoever. And you have these incredible characters who are bigger than life and someone like Lindbergh or some of the famous European pilots coming in. So, and I think that continued. In Germany, unfortunately, it kind of morphed into the idea for Tempelhof, when Tempelhof was finally being built under the Nazi regime. It was massive. And the stadium idea like took over the whole concept of the airport. And you had thousands of people. And I think the Goebbels figured out if he could invite all the heads of the workers' unions to an airshow with these famous German pilots, you know, it was like luring the

• 19:25Speaker 02

  mice into a trap. And they all came because they wanted to see these fantastic airshows. And then they arrested them. And use the airport kind of as a lure to get these guys in.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  And in that golden age, I guess Heathrow, that's where the world's coming to, no longer coming through Southampton Harbour, they're all landing at Heathrow.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  They're landing at Heathrow, but yeah, I remember flying into Heathrow and it being very glamorous. I remember coming in and just arriving and I was very proud to have dual citizenship and have a British passport. As I recall, my mother making us, you know, I had to wear a blazer with a little patch and a tie, you know, a club tie. My grey flannels and my shoes had to be polished and we went as a family and we were all incredibly well dressed.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  I suppose there's a sense that your family were tapping into that the worst is that this was so obviously futuristic. This was H2 Wells, where people were flying around these machines, landing in these sort of palatial buildings that were organised and clean and there was none of the kind of crazy mess of the early modern world and sort of people grabbing your possessions as you arrive in a crowded train station somewhere, you know. This is a sort of technocratic science fiction of a world, isn't it? And you thought, well, maybe the future is going to be like this.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  I think absolutely. I think it was the door to the future and for many people, and it still is. I mean, I'd never had that iris scanning thing done, you know, even when I went to the eye doc, I mean, I had pretty good eyes, knocking wood, but, you know, until I went to one of the airports in Europe and they had, they were trying out a new iris scanning system and all of that security stuff, you know, is the future of technology.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  It's funny you mention the way we interact with the future. I mean, I think the first iris scanner I ever saw, airport, the first time I ever saw sushi on a conveyor belt airport, and the first robot that I've ever interacted with was in a Chinese airport a couple of years ago, like an actual genuine robot wandering around giving information. And so you're right, that's where we meet the future.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  By the 1960s, Britain's vision of that future had outgrown the name London Airport. When the airport officially became Heathrow Airport in 1966, the change was more than cosmetic. It reflected a new reality. London was no longer served by a single airport. Air travel itself had entered a new age, the jet age. Heathrow had become the centrepiece of an expanding network of airports designed to serve a society in which flying was no longer reserved for a privileged few. Air travel was becoming more affordable, more accessible for more people. By the time the airport was renamed in 1966, it was on the cusp of handling around five million passengers a year. But accommodating more passengers wasn't

• 22:02Speaker 00

  simply a matter of building bigger terminals. More passengers required bigger aircraft than more of them. While travellers experienced the excitement of mass air travel, controllers were solving an increasingly complex logistical challenge. How to safely coordinate a growing number of aircraft taking off and landing safely and efficiently. As Heathrow expanded into one of the world's most connected airports, its control systems worked to make possible the very future that the airport promised, and became a testing ground for modern air traffic control.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  I am airside, folks. I'm surrounded by aircraft engines, starting engines cooling down. Just looking around me now, imagining where all these aircraft are going. I can see some cargo getting put into the belly of an American airline there. I've got a Virgin Atlantic Airbus 330, they are just getting their catering delivered. And I am walking up to one of the most eye-catching architectural features of this airport, the air traffic control tower, many, many storeys higher, huge glass gallery looking out over this field, held up with torx steel cables. I'm gazing up at it now, I'm wondering if there's going to be a lift or I'm climbing all the stairs because I'm going to go inside now.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  And we're going to head up to the nerve centre of this airport, the brain of the operation. This is the place from which all of these aircraft movements are organised. This is going to be very exciting.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  The last time I was in a space managing air movements, it was in the World War Two Battle of Britain bunker in Uxbridge, and I just wonder how much has changed.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Hello there.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  Hi Dan, nice to meet you.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  How's it going?

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Very well, thank you. My name is Eddie Dolan, I'm the head of air traffic control training at Heathrow.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Well, thank you very much for having me.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  It's a pleasure.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  It's exciting to be here. What shall we go and look at?

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, let's look at what an air traffic controller would do when they come up to work. So the first thing they do is look at this screen that we have here, which shows us what's happening on the airport right now.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Every single movement, aircraft movement on the airport.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Yep, we've got the aircraft on the ground, moving around, the inbounds and the outbounds. And we've also got what's happening in the air. And this is London.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  So that's pretty congested, isn't it?

• 24:23Speaker 04

  It is. It's the busiest airspace in the world.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Really?

• 24:26Speaker 04

  It is, yeah. Nowhere busier than this.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  I'm sorry to be a history geek here, but they are the equivalent of those amazing big maps you see at RAF Uxbridge and those World War Two maps, people moving them around with the old pool keys.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  Sliding it, sliding it around.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that, and that's the modern version of that, but in some ways, very, very similar indeed, I suppose. Let's go upstairs.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  Go upstairs.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Let's go and see it for real, yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Right then. Oh, you'd love this. You will love this. Check out these.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Oh my goodness, look at these. Hang on a second. German artillery binoculars.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Oh yes.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Zeiss artillery binoculars, are you kidding me?

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Look at the picture. Here they are.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like rangefiners.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  So there's a picture here on the wall of a German unit, maybe in the Desert Campaign, and they're looking through these Zeiss binoculars to try and calculate the range of the incoming aircraft. And you've got, what on earth, how come you've got these here?

• 25:15Speaker 04

  We've got no idea.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  You've got no idea?

• 25:17Speaker 04

  But they have been at Heathrow since the 1950s, through our three control towers that we've had, this is the third one we've had, and they've made it through every single control tower and they are stunning. They're still working, they're in perfect working order.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  So it's still operating today?

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  In Heathrow Tower, let me have a look. Oh my gosh, now I can see, that is extraordinary. I can read the licence plate on that vehicle, on that pickup truck. That's so far, I can hardly see it with the naked eye.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  We still use them. They're an operational piece of equipment.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Really?

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Yep, superb. And if you look at all the rest of the technology in the tower, it's a great contrast.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  It is a bit of a contrast because we're surrounded by massive flat screens.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  And laser computer terminals.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Isn't it a blend up here, isn't it, of old and new?

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so the role itself has remained the same, but actually, the technology allows us to have much better decision-making. We've got loads of tools, loads of information at our disposal, but it's still the human at the centre of all the decision-making.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  And there is indeed a human right behind us, in a kind of, in an extraordinary 360-degree work terminal situation, surrounded by screens.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  So this controller is our A-South controller. So they are looking at the runway to the south of us, that's runway 27 left, and that runway right now is being used for all the departing aircraft. So his job is to take the aircraft as they reach the start of the runway, and they'll all be on a preset route. There are six routes out of Heathrow, and he'll be jumbling them all up to try and get the most efficient departure sequence.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  His job won't have changed that much in terms of the range at which he's dealing with aircraft for decades.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  No, it'll stay exactly the same. And once he's finished with his job, so we'll see this aircraft turn towards the left at some point, and then once it's clean of Heathrow, we call it being clean, so it's not going to conflict with any other traffic, he can transfer it on to the radar controllers down at Swanick, and then that controller will take on to the next bit, and the next bit, and the next bit, and everybody looks after their particular portion.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  That's extraordinary.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Well, there's a National Illinois Library down in Farnborough, and you can pull out the original approach charts for Heathrow. And if you look at approach chart now, it's accurate to within half a metre, tells you exactly where to be in lat and long. But the depiction at the top of the chart just describes Heathrow as being 12 nautical miles west of Westminster Bridge. That's it. You've got to find it from there. So you can imagine these pilots heading for the bridge and they go, oh, must be 12 miles this way.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  And did you have a bit of high vis or something painted on the ground going, this is Heathrow land?

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, in the gasometer towers over here, towards Northall, there were two arrows, one pointed to Northall and one pointed to Heathrow, so that pilots didn't land at the wrong airport. You imagine that kind of stuff today. It's a world away, isn't it?

• 27:52Speaker 00

  We expect zero casualties in the industry now, don't we?

• 27:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're flying with satellite-based navigation now, it's a lot more accurate.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  What's some of those big, big steps forward in technology?

• 28:01Speaker 04

  I suppose if you split it into aircraft and then air traffic control, everything that's really big in aviation has been a world first at Heathrow. So you go from those original airliners through to the jet age, to the Comet, the 707s, and then you've got the 747. Then you move on to the age of Concorde, and all the way through to the A380s, the double deckers that we've seen today, and then through to the most fuel-efficient aircraft, the A350s, 787s, that we're operating today. And then you look at air traffic control and we've gone from rudimentary, massive primary radars and old-fashioned radios to digital stuff, modest surveillance, where we can see aircraft on a pinpoint on the screen. Again, Heathrow's been at the forefront of all of that. And now we're separating aircraft

• 28:44Speaker 04

  on final approach, rather than vast distances and miles, we're separating them by seconds so we can actually time how long an aircraft will be on the approach, so that everybody is accurately sequenced in a perfect line. So, yeah, it's all happened here first.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  And I guess, even though this wasn't World War Two airfield, during the Battle of Britain, the British, the RAF pioneered airspace management, didn't they?

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  They still recognise.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so those rudimentary systems of radar, VHF radio, they're still in use today. We're using them right now. This is the way that the controllers are moving the aircraft around, we're using a VHF radio to talk to an airplane and tell it what to do. So the actions of those people, the pioneers back in the 1940s, are still being used today.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  The jet age changed everything. By the 1960s, air travel was less about an extraordinary experience and more about making it available to an extraordinary number of people.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  I have very early memory, because I'm old enough, of landing in Goose Bay, which was in Greenland. We would leave Prestwick, which was the original bigger airport for Transatlantic in Scotland. And I think we'd go from Prestwick to Shannon, because that was the closest to the US from the British Isles. Refuel, and then from Shannon to Goose Bay in either Newfoundland or Greenland. There were two different stops there. And I remember coming out as a child and standing in this freezing cold hangar.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and in your blazer. That must have been tough.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  In the blazer, yeah, definitely. Thank you for remembering that. Still looking, you know, a little bit haggard, but still looking very proper. And that was kind of amazing. So suddenly you had these jets that could go the whole distance and in such a short time, five and a half hours from New York to Heathrow. I mean, it literally influenced everything from architecture and transportation to fashion. And I think what we said earlier about the Beatles, you know, the fact that the Beatles could fly on Pan Am to New York and be on the Ed Sullivan Show the next day, or whenever it was, and then fly down to Miami a day later, or two days later, and be on, again, on the Ed Sullivan Show, but from Miami. They just caught the moment more perfectly than anyone in terms of a cultural revolution.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  The fashion, it was like Italian designers like Pucci were designing the interiors of the airplanes, you know, and they were designing the stewardesses' outfits. And it was just incredibly sexy and incredibly modern and just cool and fantastically cool. There's a whole generation of furniture that's based on airline design, you know, post-jet age concepts of aerodynamic movement, you know, which really, all these ideas changed as soon as the jets came in.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  And so you're going long distances, you're going fast on these big jet aircraft, but you're also moving around a lot of people, right? Do we arrive at the truly, the kind of mass market of travel at that point?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  You begin the mass market moment of transport with the jumbo jets, where suddenly it's not 80 people in an airplane or 90 people, what is it, 300? It's something like that. So suddenly, all the more intimate terminals of the 60s and early 70s, they're obsolete. Within eight years, they're obsolete.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Is it changing where people go? Are they vacationing, but they're doing business trips? But they're starting to just kind of commute almost on aircraft at this point.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. It had a huge explosion just in the tourist industry, you know, in places like in the Caribbean, which maybe had these sleepy ships coming around once a month and sort of tired, pale English tourists would get off, you know, and have tea. And it was, your auntie would do it because she had time to do it, but modern businessmen or whatever didn't have the time for that. So it opened up this huge window of opportunity in places like Jamaica and Nassau and, you know, the Bahamas and all through the West Indies and all through South America, too. So a businessman from Bogota could come to New York for two days and fly back and bring his wife and kids and have a vacation.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  And so all those wonderful tourism posters from the 60s are all part of that world. So exotic. And, you know, the whole notion of the jet and the jet setting travel and all the early ads where, you know, you could have breakfast in New York and dinner at the Seville in London, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And then many of the companies, many of the really successful companies had these kind of development divisions that were building and buying hotels and resorts. So it was all part of the package, you know, the way early railway companies would, would buy up areas of land in Britain and in America, because it was very cheap land, and then develop it into that whole movement in Britain of suburban commuter kind of villages outside of London.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Similar, but more like around the world in places that never had a fancy hotel, you know?

• 33:32Speaker 00

  And as the jet age sped onto the scene, a new terminal was needed to handle the millions of people now taking to the skies.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Look at this. Just walking through an airport terminal, just mothballed. It's like a post-apocalyptic movie. What area are we coming into now?

• 33:55Speaker 05

  So this was the International Departure Lounge back in the day. Okay, so passengers come through here. We used to have, this is World Trade Free, you used to have all the posh shops down here.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, they've still got some adverts on the walls.

• 34:07Speaker 05

  So this is where, you know, after you've gone through security and you're sitting here for a few hours before you get on the plane.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  And when does it date from?

• 34:15Speaker 05

  1968.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  This is the classic.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  This is.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  That golden age of this. So folks, if you've ever looked at the subway map, the tube map of London, and you look at that dark blue Piccadilly line, you'll notice that it ends at Heathrow, but you see terminals two, three, four, five. And you're probably thinking, why is there no Terminal One? Well, Terminal One still exists, but it is closed to the public, it is mothballed. Because that's why I'm now walking through this ghostly relic of an airport terminal, just walking down these little corridors into these cavernous spaces. This one I'm coming into now was the original departures hall. There's all the desks, the signs still here, the zones where you check in. The lights are off, it's partly lit.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  I mean, folks, the nearest approximation I can give you is that it's like the set of a zombie film. It's amazing to think this was the building that paved the way for the modern understanding of the airport. This, when it opened in 1969, was just cutting edge. The whole idea of this big passenger check-in hall, the fast-track security, the restaurants, the bars on the other side, this was all super exciting. And it also marked the transition from air travel as a niche activity, of a super luxury activity, to something that everyday, normal people could aspire to. This was built to process a million people a year. And it gave us the blueprint for the airport we recognise today.

• 35:43Speaker 05

  This was the original Concorde Terminal. When you first started to fly, you used to fly from here, right? It was the Bahrain flights first, before it was allowed to go across the Atlantic. And then from here, you used to have the weekend Barbados flights from here.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Oh, you could fly to Barbados for the weekend on Concorde?

• 35:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. Saturday morning, 10:20, I think it was.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  So this is as it was when it was closed down just over a decade ago. It's mysterious, isn't it? It's great, time travel.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  The jet age didn't just transform the passenger experience, it also revolutionised air freight, an often overlooked but crucial part of the story of the jet age. While aircraft had always carried mail and small consignments since the early 20th century, the arrival of jet airliners transformed what was possible. Faster, larger, and able to fly further than ever before, jets turned airports into engines of global commerce. By the 1970s, wide-bodied aircraft, such as the Boeing 747, were carrying not only hundreds of passengers, but also tonnes of cargo beneath their feet. In the decades that followed, global supply chains, express parcel services and e-commerce would make air freight indispensable.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  If the jet age shrank the wealth of travellers, it also shrank it for trade, allowing goods to cross continents overnight, and making airports the modern crossroads of the global economy. A modern Silk Road of sorts. So let's step behind the scenes into the hidden airport that most of us never even realise exists when we travel through the very visible airport.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  This is like a scene out of Toy Story. You come into, working along a raised gantry, raised platform, and we're looking down at a fast-moving conveyor belt on which there are loads and loads of boxes and parcels and packages, some very small, some like envelopes, some really big. And then they are in turn sliding down all sorts of chutes to be gathered up and placed in big containers to be put in holes of planes. It is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life. And here, I'm meeting Alan, how are you, mate?

• 37:49Speaker 06

  Nice to meet you, Ben.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Good to see you, buddy.

• 37:50Speaker 06

  I'm Alan, Alan Smilie. I'm the Senior Director for Operations for London Heathrow and London Luton, and I'm the UK Network Planning Group Director for DHL Aviation. So a very long title, great to have you here.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  This is a lot of responsibility.

• 38:04Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  I don't trust myself with my phone. You're running over, how big, I can't even see the other end.

• 38:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I started in this facility when I was 19 years old. I've worked for DHL for 25 years, so we're very proud of this facility. This is London Heathrow Hub. This is where we connect material via our DHL cargo freighters, as well as our commercial airline partners.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  It's so exciting, isn't it? We all live in a world where we can access goods from all over the planet. We are used to having things delivered to our homes and places of work. We can get really anything we want now, so right, quick and level for a new ministry. What we're looking at here is the structure that makes that all happen. This is what goes on behind the scenes 24 hours a day.

• 38:44Speaker 06

  That's correct. This is a 24/7 operation. We're open on Christmas Day. Cargo doesn't stop.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  How many objects a day?

• 38:52Speaker 06

  Okay, in a, let's say, 2am to 2pm delivery cycle that we will call it here, we would sort between 45,000 pieces to 50,000 pieces on a normal day. And in our peak periods, we can go up to 65,000 to 70,000 pieces.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  So you're talking millions a week?

• 39:12Speaker 06

  We're talking, yeah, close on to a million a week, yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  What are some of the wildest things you've seen?

• 39:16Speaker 06

  Well, look, probably the weirdest and most wonderful thing that we have had through this facility is a gorilla.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  An actual gorilla?

• 39:23Speaker 06

  A gorilla, yeah. It received special handling. You'll be glad to know it didn't go around the sort system or be moved around here, but it's actually Kibuli, the gorilla, that is now in London Zoo at the moment. He came in here a few years ago now and received special handling via the Canary Islands, into Madrid, into London, special handling, special aircraft handling, and then we moved him through to his place now in London Zoo.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  So he's happy?

• 39:51Speaker 06

  Seems very happy. We took a bunch of schoolchildren as part of our purpose banner down to London Zoo, and we were delighted to see him there, and he has a full family now. So we see a lot of car parts, spare parts. We'll also see some manufacturing, a lot of industrial mining equipment to places such as Western Australia is very popular as well. We also see medical equipment, large medical life-saving equipment that we move through the life science industries. We do move racehorses, that's out of a different airport, which...

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Racehorses?

• 40:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, horses, yeah. I definitely think the big buzz for us, because we're a company that loves sport, is when the lions material comes through. Yeah, I mean...

• 40:35Speaker 00

  And it works, they got the win.

• 40:36Speaker 06

  So that was, for me, always quite cool, right? You see the guys running out, and we move the rugby ball, so the balls, the food that they're eating. We're helping get the team prepared.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  I guess when I think of air travel, I think mostly of people, and when I think of sea travel, I think mostly of goods. What I'm learning today is that that is not the case at all.

• 40:56Speaker 06

  So if we talk about Heathrow specifically, DHL's had operations here since the early 1980s. If it stops, you notice it immediately. You would absolutely see potentially delays to medical appointments, operations, financial services, you would see backups potentially of medicines that you can, supply chains of perishables as well, food that is imported to the country and out of the country. The things that we take for granted on a day-to-day basis, that we just go online now and click and we expect it there in two days, well, they'll take seven, 10, 15 days because it backs up, because the world doesn't stop. So those suits, those dresses, those shoes, those kitchen appliances that you want to do, it would all be delayed in your everyday life.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  So much of this, the character of our modern world, the way that we consume and shop and commit, it's dependent on facilities like this. I mean, they really are ports, just as London would have been a great port, Venice back in the day would have been a great port. There are two different things going on at Heathrow.

• 41:57Speaker 06

  There's a huge cargo community in itself at Heathrow Airport, right? There's a labyrinth of cargo tunnels, of people that are dedicated to work in the cargo industry. When you sit in your seat and you look out, what you can't see is the hundreds of shipments that are safely screened and compliantly loaded into the belly of the aircraft at Heathrow. We use over 55 to 60 aircraft a day from this facility to transatlantic, to the Middle East, into Europe, long-haul, wide-body, cargo-friendly aircraft. It happens on every flight.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  It's a world that never sleeps. The moment a plane touches down, an invisible army of handlers, customs officers, engineers and logistics specialists spring into action. Within hours, goods that have travelled halfway around the world are on motorways, hospitals, on supermarket shelves, or heading for another continent. Again, it's just a reminder that the airport is just a central part of this modern world that we've built.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  So I'm back in departures now. You can buy everything here. And this is an indication that the airport is a shopping destination, is a retail experience. It is like a mall in here. I occasionally buy some souvenirs to my kids at the airport, but long gone are the days when those are all that's for sale, a spit of water and some keyrings. There are all sorts of things to buy and do in this place. The airport is changing and it's growing, it's becoming something entirely new, it's really becoming a destination in its own right.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Once you get through that gauntlet, you're in this kind of paradise of consumerism now, where they have these super luxury shopping malls. There are things you can't get at even in Paris or London, you know, that wealthy people go to, you know, just to shop. Well, they're going someplace, but they wait to buy their Louis Vuitton shoes at the new terminal. And that's kind of fascinating. And that goes back to just after World War Two, when they realised it wasn't enough to charge, you know, landing fees, that you needed to have some other kind of retail income at airports to make them pay for themselves. I did a podcast about a year ago, it was all about who buys luggage at the airport? Like, why would you do that, whoever does that? And I said, I do, you know, when I was working journalist, you know, I had a crappy bag that I couldn't find the bag I like.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  I ended up in, I think, yeah, it was Istanbul, which has this beautiful new terminal, I mean, incredibly fancy. And there was a great bag that I would never have bought in a million years, you know, in my normal life, but you're just sitting there again for three or four hours, right, waiting for your plane. And I got it. And I think shopping is a huge, you know, makes people feel better.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Is there one that you identify, that first time an airport looks like a shopping mall?

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, the earliest one, post-war in America, Baltimore, they were trying to compete with Washington DC and New York and Philadelphia. So it's a very competitive market on the mid-Atlantic in the US. And they went out of their way, it's called Friendship Airport, huge airport, sprawling kind of place, bigger than anything in the States at the time. And Life magazine did a huge spread on it, it showed like this beauty salon, there was a big bookstore, there were fancy restaurants, shoe shine place, you know, that you could do almost anything there and had all these shops. I think it was the first that really had everything, there were others that planned for it, and it never did well, it kind of went bankrupt at a certain point.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  But JFK, the early plans by Wallace Harrison, Harrison was, had married into the Rockefeller family and, you know, was the one who was the master planner of Lincoln Center and the United Nations, you know, he was this big master planner thinker. And he'd been commissioned in the 50s to come up with an idea for a new New York airport, Idlewild. And the idea was kind of so far ahead of its time, because it was all about these huge shopping malls, that you would enter first through the shopping malls and the city of New York would make all this great income from that. So it was a concept that goes pretty far back.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  And yet now, here we are, and places like Singapore have got botanical gardens, movie theatres, I mean, it's wild.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  The butterfly, the butterfly garden is the greatest in Singapore.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  What does a future airport look like, do you think?

• 46:18Speaker 02

  There are few around the world now, but in San Francisco, I love when I go in there, because there's a great yoga meditation room, that's just incredibly quiet and gentle when you go in there, and you don't feel like you're in an airport. I think airports are going to have to have more and more of these kind of downtime places for reflection and meditation. Again, this is another mark of the future, you know, kind of future visions. They're often places that architecturally and engineering-wise, you use concepts that haven't been used anywhere else, because they're reaching for a kind of a different, almost utopian vision of what the future's going to bring. So it's going to come from some engineering genius that rethinks the whole basic concept of what an airport is.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  I think that's coming, and there are people who are, who are working on those kinds of ideas, you know. And the idea of the environmentally correct airport, how does such a thing exist? But people are talking about that, writing about that a lot now.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  I'm on the gallery now, looking down at the crowded concourse. I can see excited families, I can see solo travellers, I can see exhausted people having a snooze. All of life is here, folks. It's the cusp of the summer holidays, the planes are lined up outside, the sun is shining. There's something about airports, I remember as a kid, it meant going to see my grandma in Canada, as an adult, it's meant being lucky enough to travel over the world, look at some of the greatest historical sites and talk about them to all of you folks. Whatever age, there's something deeply exciting about these strange and remarkable places.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Dan's Notes History. I hope it's helped you while away some time while you're waiting for your next flight, or it'll make you think differently about travelling through that airport next time. The many fun facts I'm here to share with your travel companions, certainly. I'd like to thank all of my guests at Heathrow Airport. And of course, Alastair Gordon, you can find out more in his book Naked Airport. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the history of Heathrow, you can discover more at heathrow.com/80, we'll put the link in the show notes. See you next time.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com/subscribe.